OCEANSIDE  The El Camino High School music room that has been renamed after Mark Lowery is lined with trophies, but he’d rather not talk about them.

“It’s not about awards,” he said recently, standing in the band room where he taught music in Oceanside for 22 years. “It’s about the kids.”

Lowery, 62, retired from teaching at the end of the past semester, ending a 37-year career that began as a music teacher at Lexington Junior High in Anaheim, where the he grew up.

“I didn’t know I was so well liked until I retired,” he joked as he talked about the thanks he has heard recently about his years in the district. “We’ve been having retirement parties for the last month, it seems like, and all the accolades are coming in now.”

About 150 students filled the band room at one retirement party, said Lowery, who is still waiting to heal from recent carpel tunnel surgery before he can play the new set of TaylorMade golf clubs the band’s booster club gave him in appreciation.

Lowery comes from a musical family; his 92-year-old father still plays French horn every day, and his sons Matthew and Parker played in the El Camino marching band in 2005-06.

But it was his own high school band coach who inspired him to be a music teacher himself. That teacher also asked him to switch from clarinet to bassoon, an instrument he still plays today, because it was needed in the band.

Lowery earned a bachelor and teaching credential at Long Beach State College, then took his first teaching job in 1977 in his hometown of Anaheim.

After three years at the junior high, Lowery moved on to Savanna High in the same district, then after three years headed to Mission Viejo High, where he taught until taking a job at Carlsbad High in 1989.

He applied for at El Camino High in 1992. Mark Phelps, the band teacher at Oceanside High since 1982, was on the interview committee that hired him. The two have been friends ever since.

“He’s a great teacher,” Phelps said about Lowery. “I have a lot of respect for him. If I have a situation, I can call him up and say, ‘Mark, what do you think about this?’ He’s a very giving type of person.”

Phelps called Lowery a great teacher with a great sense of humor.

“We’ve traveled with bands, and he has a great rapport with students,” Phelps said. “And I can see why. He can joke around with them.”

But Lowery said students and their families also appreciated the discipline he stressed in his music room.

“I teach them responsibility,” he said. “You’re responsible for your team. You’re responsible for your section. You’re responsible to be on time.”

Competitions were part of the job, and the trophies came with good performances. His bands would play about six or seven concerts in the fall. Then there were jazz concerts, orchestra concerts and the many, many bus trips. Lowery estimates the number to be about 400 in 37 years.

The awards were a product of practice and performing uniformly, but were not the goal, he said.

“I think the job is helping all students,” he said. “You want to see them progress. And students are much smarter than we sometimes give them credit for. They know if I’m treating them correctly and if I’m asking them to do the right thing.”

The marching band usually performs in the 4-A division, the fourth of six division. Since his arrival in 1992, Lowery said membership in the band has been steady at about 110 musicians. Counting members of the concert band, the program has 140 musicians.

El Camino’s enrollment, however, has grown from 1,600 to 3,320 in the same time, making it the largest school in the county. Lowery said the band hasn’t grown proportionally because fewer students are coming into the program from feeder schools.

But while cutbacks have hurt music programs in other districts, Lowery said Oceanside Unified has always supported the school’s music program, which also has been helped by a booster club that raises about $85,000 each year.

Lowery, who was the 2004 teacher of the year in Oceanside Unified, served for 20 years as a board member in the Southern California School Band and Orchestra Association, and was president of the association from 2005 to 2009.

This fall, Daniel James from Ramona High School will take over for Lowery in the music room. With some free time finally at hand, Lowery said he plans to travel and play his bassoon more.

With no band camp to lead this summer, he also has time for more performances. Lowery will be in the pit orchestra at the Moonlight Amphitheater in Vista during performances of “My Fair Lady,” which runs Aug. 4-30.